Back in November of 2020, reports indicated that Believe Digital was considering arriving on the stock market with a more than $2.4 billion (€2 billion) IPO. Now, the indie label distribution company has officially announced that it intends to debut on the Euronext Paris – raising about $608.15 million (€500 million) in the process.
Believe higher-ups revealed the multimillion-dollar IPO plans on their website today. Worth noting at the outset, however, is that the Paris-headquartered company (like London-based Hipgnosis) has prohibited residents of the United States, Canada, Japan, and Australia from so much as navigating to the IPO-announcement section of BelieveMusic.com, presumably to comply with market regulations.
In any event, the 16-year-old Believe, which now employs roughly 1,300 individuals in over 50 countries, also relayed that France’s Autorité des marchés financiers (AMF) stock-oversight body has approved its registration document – an important step towards completing the IPO.
But the TuneCore owner – which stated that it generated about $885 million (€728 million) from digital-music sales last year, while having provided “solutions” to north of 850,000 artists as of December 31st – has yet to disclose when exactly it expects to make shares available to investors or how much these shares will cost.
14 percent of Believe’s 2020 consolidated revenue derived from the Americas, against 18 percent from Asia, Oceania, and Africa, 18 percent from France, 22 percent from Germany, and 28 percent from the rest of Europe. On this front, it bears mentioning that the European music industry recorded 3.5 percent year-over-year growth in 2020, with the United Kingdom, Germany, and France accounting for 59.5 percent of total revenue.
More broadly, 2020 saw a number of prominent music-industry companies cash in on IPOs. Almost one year ago, Warner Music Group (WMG) returned to the stock market after close to a decade of entirely private ownership, pricing its shares at $25 apiece; at the time of this piece’s publishing, WMG was trading for $37.03.
Additionally, BTS agency Hybe (formerly Big Hit Entertainment) achieved considerable success out of the gate with its October of 2020 IPO, as shares nearly doubled in value during the first day of trading. Moreover, Hybe has since maintained this momentum, as its per-share price rested at $232.37/₩258,500 when the Korea Exchange closed today.
And in terms of 2021 IPOs, Endeavor late last month listed shares on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol EDR, and French conglomerate Vivendi is set to take Universal Music Group (UMG) public sometime this year. The Big Three record label – 20 percent of which belongs to Tencent – recorded Q1 2021 earnings growth ahead of its long-awaited IPO.